Adventure Water Drinking – the New Outdoor
Sport!

By Marcus Cox

When I participated in the Lake Berryessa cleanup one year I
was one of the scuba divers who gathered trash from the bottom of the lake – a
lot of it! We ended up with 1.5 TONS of trash before the day was done. It is
sad to see folks who love coming up here leave trash behind, especially plastic
bottles that last for centuries. We certainly don’t want Lake Berryessa ending
up like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (a plastic swamp the size of
Texas).

If you watched “The Story of Bottled Water” at www.storyofstuff.org you know it is time
to stop buying water in plastic bottles, if not just to save money. Bottled
water costs more than gas now, and most of it is filtered tap water anyway.
Pretty slick marketing though - don’t you love the pictures of the lakes &
streams on the bottles?

So the next question is which water filter bottle to buy.
There are several on the market now. I wanted a bottle that allowed me to drink
lake water without worrying. Or better yet, one that allowed me to drink from
our swimming pool so we would have an extra 27,000 gallons of drinking water in
case of emergencies.

The bottle I found does everything the others do but also
removes cysts, viruses, parasites, and even bacteria like Cryptospiridium and
E. Coli (which by the way caused a huge water company to recall hundreds of
thousands of their so called “pure mountain water” bottles).

To remove these little bacteria critters the filter has to
do log6 filtration or 99.9999% which means 1 bacteria per million gets through.
Fortunately your immune system can handle that with no sweat.

So I decided to put this thing to the test and went
“walkabout” with it and drank from some pretty nasty water sources. A local
swamp with deer poop, flies, frogs, etc; then a drain pipe with filthy
disgusting water (I had seen a dead fox carcass upstream). I also drank from a
side pool on a slimy creek, our swimming pool, and, of course, Lake Berryessa.
Needless to say the lake was a walk in the park after drinking from all these
other places.

In every case the water tasted great, was crystal clear, and
actually tasted better than the bottled water I had earlier that morning. My
wife filmed me while I drank from these places so if you want to see the bottle
in action I posted the videos at http://www.ariixwaterfilter.com.